Application Issues

macrumors newbie

So i have my home directory on an external hard drive along with all my libraries for iphoto, aperture itunes ect... When the hard drive is plugged into my desktop computer i can open all applications fine and the libraries show up, safari saves my bookmarks ect.. However when my external HD is plugged into my macbook pro ( logged on to the same home directory) every time i open one of the above apps i have to select the library every time i open the app by holding option when i open them, otherwise a message pops up that says a library cannot be created ect... same with safari the welcome animation comes up every time and all my bookmarks will have been deleted since the last time i opened safari (Also the message that a keychain cannot be found to store "safari" frequently pops up while browsing). The same goes for every other application whenever i open them they act as if it's the first time i'm opening them. This has become very frustrating. I have checked that i have permission on the external HD and what not. Any and all help is appreciated.

thread startermacrumors newbie

also something that might help is that when i'm on the laptop it adds a 1 in path name of the external hard drive in all apps that try to access it. i think thtas the problem but i don't know how to get rid of it.

macrumors 68030

That would be the problem. Most likely, you have a duplicate folder in the /Volumes directory because you launched an app while the external HDD was not connected and that app created the directory it was looking for (ie: /Volumes/extHDD/Library/) where "extHDD" is the name of your external HDD. So when you plug in the real one, there's already a folder of that name in /Volumes so it appends a 1 to the name so they don't conflict. The solution is to delete that folder, and you'll have to get to /Volumes directly.

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